Zeusblog

Today a series of 12 Olympics posters by famous artists were unveiled to promote next year’s games. The posters are going to be exhibited at the Tate Modern as part of the ‘Cultural Olympiad’. That’s the same Cultural Olympiad that is towing an ice island around the coast of Devon, so you can probably see where I’m going with this… It could all be straight out of the spoof Olympic documentary ‘Deliverance’.  These posters really are dreadful.

You can see them on the BBC News website here. Bridget Reilly (surprise, surprise) has done some stripes, Tracy Emin has done a quick scribble, and somebody called Michael Craig-Martin seems to have put the word ‘Go’ over what looks like a clipart stopwatch. You get the picture.

Of course, I may have this all wrong and the artists were only given 30 minutes to create them, in which case you’d have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Barcelona did a much better job superimposing athletes onto NASA views of Earth. 19 years later, I can still remember one with a kayaker digging his paddle into the eye of a hurricane. I wish I’d done that poster. I can’t say the same for any of these.

Another in our series of “What were they thinking?” branding examples. I saw this lorry delivering to a local butchers, burst out laughing, and made a mental note not to buy chicken from there. It was so unbelievable that I had to google the company. Turns out they started in 1911, so the word Diaper probably didn’t mean anything then. But a century of American cultural colonialism later (don’t get me started), the obvious brand association is dirty nappies. MMmmmmm. Now it seems that the family that owns the company is actually called Diaper, so I suppose the conversation about changing the name might well be a little awkward, but perhaps it’s a conversation they ought to be brave enough to have, because if my mouth waters at the thought of stinky nappies, it’s because I’m about to puke.

I keep walking past this van that parks near where I live and I can’t help but think what were they thinking?

And why didn’t anyone speak up and point out that the logo says DIE?

Unless of course, I’m wrong and their divine events actually take place in heaven, in which case a logo that says DIE is perfectly appropriate.

The census forms have hit the doormats this week and although we are all legally obliged to complete and return them, I predict that there will be much hand-wringing about low response rates. All kinds of politicians, historians and social commentators will be lined up to spout off about whether the problem is that people don’t understand the need for the information to be gathered, or that they feel the questions are too intrusive, or that people will think that they will be prosecuted for benefits fraud if they reveal that they have an undeclared lodger or that they weren’t actually available for work on the census date. They will all miss the point. The problem is that the forms have been delivered nearly three weeks ahead of when they have to be filled in. While it’s true that they have put in question 17 to try and keep our interest levels up – can you think of any possible reason why has it been “intentionally left blank”? – but that’s nearly three weeks for the form to be put on one side, have other post piled on top of it and forgotten about. When did you last see a piece of direct mail that implored you to act in three weeks time? I doubt that even the most hard core direct mail monster has ever bothered to test a call to action like that.

My wife just bought a new phone, and I found the endline on the packaging as surprising as her reason for needing a new phone (she dropped her old one in a bucket of water in case you were wondering!). She bought a nice little Sony Ericsson and as you can see in the picture, on the box it has the words “make. believe.”

As a copywriter, I find this puzzling. Of course, I can see what they were trying to do: make – Sony make things; believe – you can believe in Sony; and, giving them the benefit of the doubt, their products are so amazing that you’d almost think they were make believe.

However, all I see is make believe i.e. it’s not true, made up, load of old boll###s. Why didn’t anyone hold their hand up and say “that doesn’t quite work, let’s think of something else”?

Perhaps they thought “nobody will think that about Sony”. Well having read all their blurb about how green the phone is (with a magnifying glass – they’ve made the manual tiny to save paper), I do.

During the election, the Tories kept saying they were going to make massive cuts but it wouldn’t deepen the recession because they would be cutting out lots of waste. I thought then, and still do now, that it was just a smokescreen for deep cuts that were ideologically rather than economically motivated.

But then a greedy outsourcing company called SERCO and (giving them the benefit of the doubt) incompetent civil servants conspire to give the Tories an example of staggering waste and the excuse they need to continue to cut away like mad axemen.

The waste in question is £105 million spent over three years on a website. Yes, I really did write £105 million. And yes, on a website. And no, not a website like google or facebook or twitter – the website in question is the one for Business Link. Yes, Business Link.

I already thought Business Link was a box ticking waste of time and money having had to endure a three hour meeting with one of their “consultants” (the word consultant should have raised a red flag but we live and learn…) discussing how the way ahead for our business was to write out environmental policies and the like, but the revelation about their website is the icing on the cake.

Read about it on the BBC blog I read about it on by clicking > here  <

I could go on and on in an outraged of Mortimer Street style, but the comments on the original blog have got that covered ( with some interesting cost analysis from web professionals ). Suffice to say, we’d be happy to do the job for half the price… very happy indeed

So they’ve redesigned the pedestrian crossing at Oxford Circus.

Apparently, it’s based on street crossings in Japan. According to a Westminster Councillor “Taking our inspiration from the Far East makes perfect sense as the Japanese have perfected the art of managing large numbers of people through good design and engineering.” 

And that’s not all…

“This new crossing, which will transform Oxford Circus and ensure visitors who emerge from the Tube are impressed by what greets them, is part of a whole series of improvements taking place to ensure the West End looks truly world class in time for 2012.”

Our office is round the corner, so I went to see it.

Hmmm. Looks like some different coloured tarmac to me.

But the really puzzling thing is how some tarmac and a few extra traffic lights cost £5million.

£5million. Yes, that’s what I wrote. £5million – that’s what they said it cost.

I think I’m in the wrong business…

I’ve been listening to Heart FM quite a bit recently. Not through choice, but laziness. As a serious thoughtful type, I tend to listen to Radio 4, but because my son is nine he’d rather listen to Heart FM and retunes the radio every time he’s in the car. When I can’t be bothered to touch the dial I listen to Heart.

So anyway, I’ve come to a conclusion about Heart, which is that they should really be called Lionel Ritchie FM. Honestly that guy could sort out the global economic crisis with his royalty fees from Heart alone. And they should change their tagline, regardless of whether they change their name to Lionel Ritchie FM – ‘More music variety’ – I believe the technical name for that kind of tagline is called ‘the big lie’. The idea is that if you have a big obvious problem, just say the opposite in a confident voice over and over again. Eventually it will sink in and people will believe it. Other examples include ‘This is the age of the train’ when everybody thought British Rail was just, well rubbish really, and ‘I’m Lovin it’ when I’m so not. So if you play the same old music over and over and over and over again you say ‘More music variety’ over and over until people think it’s true. Well I don’t listen to Heart often enough to fall for that one.

I quite like Jamie and Harriet though.

The Dunwich Dynamo is a magnificently eccentric event. Every year, on a pre-arranged date (this year it’s July 4th), hundreds of cyclists turn up at London Fields. They pay £1 for photocopied directions (handily avoiding dangerous A-roads once you’re out of London) or just follow the long line of blinking red LED lights. Then they all ride off through the night to Dunwich on the Suffolk coast about 120 miles away. About halfway into the ride there’s a village that opens up its (warm and dry) village hall in the middle of the night and sells pasta salad, flapjacks and tea to refuel the weary cyclists. Other than that, you’re on your own – there’s no backup or rescue service. 

When you get to Dunwich you’re supposed to jump in the sea, but most people get breakfast at the beach cafe and fall asleep. To get back to London, you can book a slot for your bike in a furniture van and a seat for you on a coach. Some people catch the train back and some nutters ride back. People do it on all sorts of bikes; race bikes, touring bikes, commuting bikes, fixed wheelers, recumbents, folding bikes, and even tandems. I say even tandems because my cousin and I did it on a tandem a couple of years ago – quite the stupidest endurance endeavour I’ve ever undertaken. We thought it would be fun on a tandem and we might even be quite fast. But it was a tandem with soft mountain bike tyres – it was like pedalling through treacle, and in the rain; the torrential, unremitting, cold, wet, wet rain. We did have a lot of good laughs in the face of adversity though. Which is why we’re doing it again – but not on a tandem! If you’d like to join in, click here for details from the organisers.

You can get an idea what it’s like from this (quite long) video of the 2007 event, which was the one we did on a tandem…

Chalky